UF Health Rebranding Shows Employees 'The Big Picture'

An ambitious rebranding plan creatively brings together a hospital system, medical school, health science colleges, research institutes, and physician practices.

Timing an internal campaign to win over the hearts and minds of employees before a major rebranding effort is key to the campaign's success, especially if the system that is getting rebranded is large. That's because employees' reach in the community is vast.

Timing the internal outreach is also tricky. UF Health, formerly UF&Shands, not only timed its internal campaign perfectly, but the academic health center and system in Florida also worked carefully to prepare the more than 22,000 employees to be ready and willing to go along with the system's new name and tagline.

Laying the foundation
The beginnings of a new path for the University of Florida Health Science Center and its partnership with Shands HealthCare actually began three years ago, in 2010, when David Guzick, MD, Ph.D., senior vice president for health affairs and president of UF Health announced the system's strategic plan called "Forward Together."

The plan was ambitious in that it aimed to bring together the hospital system, the medical school, the other health science colleges, research institutes, as well as physician practices.

At the time of the strategic plan, Shands employees and UF employees were functionally separate even though they often worked side by side. The two organizations were and remain legally separate entities, but their work and mission became a shared vision under Guzick's leadership.

To reinforce the singular mission of two organizations, the hospital introduced a new brand name, UF&Shands, and tagline: "The University of Florida Academic Health Center." The UF was blue, as was Shands, and the ampersand was a bright orange. The color scheme mimicked the university's colors, but it was the ampersand that quickly came to symbolize the partnership, says Guzick.

"The ampersand began to represent this process of coming together as a functioning single unit," says Guzick. "Everyone came together and the ampersand became representative of that."

Moving slowly
Transitioning three years ago to UF&Shands was a major undertaking, and it's likely that employees thought that brand change was permanent. Melanie Ross, chief communications officer for the system, says the strategic plan to pull all the separate healthcare units under the umbrella of UF&Shands worked.

"All the employees saw themselves reflected in that brand," says Ross.

Even Guzick, who still has an orange ampersand fabricated out of metal in his office, says it was hard to let the symbol go when it had been such a successful tool for bridging a gap internally. "We were basically saying goodbye to the ampersand," says Guzick." It sits in my office. It's an important piece of history."

However, the work that went into bring the university employees together with Shands employees paid off when it was time to announced its newest brand, University of Florida Health, or UF Health.

"We were building momentum," says Ross. "Because that groundwork was laid and people saw themselves working together and working toward a shared vision and shared goal. I think they understood we had gotten to a point as an organization that it was time to really assess… 'How do we go to the next level?' "

Readying the staff
To prepare employees for another shift in branding, UF Health launched a four-week internal campaign called The Big Picture. Ross says the point of the campaign was not to announce the new name, but rather, to plant the seed that the employees were a part of a bigger vision for the health system.

"What we wanted to do was get employees into the proper mindset, so that when they heard the announcement they were already thinking more as one, and also that their role across our large, complex, and often complicated system was recognized," says Ross.

To that end, Ross says a photographer was sent out to UF Health locations in Gainesville and Jacksonville to take pictures of employees.

"We encouraged people to actually represent the organization by pulling a partner from the other organization to go along with them," says Ross. "It was a way to get people engaged and excited in their little neck of the woods and to reflect that visually and graphically. Some people held up little chalkboards that had UF&Shands written on them. One [arrow] would be pointing to a UF employee and one [arrow] would be pointing to a Shands employee."

More than 250 pictures were taken and posted on a website specifically developed for The Big Picture campaign, where employees were asked to vote on their favorite picture. A contest was also held asking employees to name the location of various health system landmarks. The photos were the big draw, but the site also had blog post-style messages from leadership and videos featuring employees.

All of it was aimed at setting employees up for the big announcement of the name change to UF Health on May 20.

Announcing the change
Having successfully kept the name change from UF&Shands to UF Health a secret from employees (key leadership groups were informed) and the media, Ross says the announcement was made on the three-year anniversary of the "Forward Together" strategic plan. The coincidence was pure luck, says Ross.

"The planets aligned… so, we invited all employees to celebrate the anniversary of that (strategic plan), and share in their vision for the future. A sort of a 'State of the Union' address for the hospital, so to speak."

Ross says that in the three months since the rebrand, employees have embraced the change. Anecdotally, they're ramping up requests for new business cards and requesting to use the new logo. The numbers back up the anecdotes, says Lindsay Wessel, senior account planner at Raleigh, NC-based Capstrat, an agency that UF Health worked with to develop the internal and external campaigns.

"We were able to easily measure because it (The Big Picture campaign) all lived online," says Wessel. "There are more than 22,000 employees at UF Health. The metrics showed us that more than 11,000 employees visited and engaged with the site, which is impressive. We got more than half the employees to visit."

What impressed Wessel more than the high rate of participation was that more than one-third of employees did not have access to the website during their workday, meaning they had to go to the site after hours or during their lunch breaks.

The hospital system also held multiple employee forums across its system to explain the purpose behind the rebrand and the vision. The thought put into getting employees on board so far in advance—three years—shows that leadership truly values its workforce. Authenticity like that can go a long way in changing the loyalty of an employee who is resistant to a name or brand change.

Guzick knows that longtime employees can be hard to convince, but he says he is seeing signs that the vision of a single, functioning organization from two legally separate entities is working.

"When folks who've been here a long time and didn't think anything would ever change, either stop me in the hall or send me a note saying, 'This is really an exciting place to be,' it hits home, in terms of how the brand is functionally becoming operative in the organization," says Guzick.

"This is more than employee engagement. They're all working improving patient care, our research efforts, and they all understand their role in the bigger picture."